Early attempts at mapping and correlation

The seminal work of Smith at clarifying various relationships in the interpretation of rock successions and their correlations elsewhere resulted in an intensive look at what the rock record and, in particular, what the fossil record had to say about past events in the long history of the Earth. A testimony to Smith’s efforts in producing one of the first large-scale geologic maps of a region is its essential accuracy in portraying what is now known to be the geologic succession for the particular area of Britain covered.

The application of the ideas of Lyell, Smith, Hutton, and others led to the recognition of lithologic and paleontologic successions of similar character from widely scattered areas. It also gave rise to the realization that many of these similar sequences could be correlated.

The French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, in particular, was able to demonstrate the similarity of fauna from a number of Cuvier’s and Alexandre Brongniart’s collections of fossils from the Paris Basin with fossil fauna from the sub-Apennines of Italy and the London Basin. While based mainly on the collections of Cuvier and Brongniart, Lamarck’s observations provided much more insight into the real significance of using fossils strictly for correlation purposes. Lamarck disagreed with Cuvier’s interpretation of the meaning of faunal extinction and regeneration in stratigraphic successions. Not convinced that catastrophes caused massive and widespread disruption of the biota, Lamarck preferred to think of organisms and their distribution in time and space as responding to the distribution of favourable habitats. If confronted with the need to adapt to abrupt changes in local habitat—Cuvier’s catastrophes—faunas must be able to change in order to survive. If not, they became extinct. Lamarck’s approach, much like that of Hutton, stressed the continuity of processes and the continuum of the stratigraphic record. Moreover, his view that organisms respond to the conditions of their environment had important implications for the uniformitarian approach to interpreting Earth history.

Once it was recognized that many of the rocks of the Paris Basin, London Basin, and parts of the Apennines apparently belonged to the same sequence by virtue of the similarity of their fossil content, Arduino’s term Tertiary (proposed as part of his fourfold division of rock succession in the Tuscan Hills of Italy) began to be applied to all of these diverse locations. Further work by Lyell and Gérard-Paul Deshayes resulted in the term Tertiary being accepted as one of the fundamental divisions of geologic time.

The concepts of facies, stages, and zones

During the latter half of the 18th and early 19th centuries, most of the research on the distribution of rock strata and their fossil content treated lithologic boundaries as events in time representing limits to strata that contain unique lithology and perhaps a unique fossil fauna, all of which are the result of unique geologic processes acting over a relatively brief period of time. Hutton recognized early on, however, that some variations occur in the sediments and fossils of a given stratigraphic unit and that such variations might be related to differences in depositional environments. He noted that processes such as erosion in the mountains of Scotland, transportation of sand and gravels in streams flowing from these mountains, and the deposition of these sediments could all be observed to be occurring concurrently. At a given time then, these diverse processes were all taking place at separate locations. As a consequence, different environments produce different sedimentary products and may harbour different organisms. This aspect of differing lithologic type or environmental or biological condition came to be known as facies. (It was Steno who had, in 1669, first used the term facies in reference to the condition or character of the Earth’s surface at a particular time.)

The significance of the facies concept for the analysis of geologic history became fully apparent with the findings of the Swiss geologist Amanz Gressly. While conducting survey work in the Jura Mountains in 1838, Gressly observed that rocks from a given position in a local stratigraphic succession frequently changed character as he traced them laterally. He attributed this lateral variation to lateral changes in the depositional environments responsible for producing the strata in question. Having no term to apply to the observed changes, he adopted the word facies. While Gressly employed the term specifically in the context of lithologic character, it is applied more broadly today. As now used, the facies concept has come to encompass other types of variation that may be encountered as one moves laterally (e.g., along outcroppings of rock strata exposed in stream valleys or mountain ridges) in a given rock succession. Lithologic facies, biological facies, and even environmental facies can be used to describe sequences of rocks of the same or different age having a particularly unique character.

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